In 2016, some at Google allegedly realized that it had “political power” and tried to flex it against President Trump.
An exclusive report broken by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on his show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, revealed a disturbing Google email chain sent out on November 9, 2016. The first email, “Elections results and the Latino vote,” was written by Google’s Multicultural Marketing department head, Eliana Murillo. In the four-page email, Murillo describes how she and her coworkers engaged in “non-partisan activities” to boost Latino voting turnout. However, Murillo slipped up and admitted that despite Google’s “political power,” only “71% of Latinos voted for Hillary, and that wasn’t enough.”
At first, the memo had no mention of partisanship. Murillo stated that she and her colleagues “worked very hard” to get the Latino vote “with our features, our partners, and our voices.” The company used YouTubers, social media events, and a non-partisan campaign focusing on “the power of the Latino vote.”
However, the results caught her off guard and showed more about the reality of the campaign. “Ultimately, after all was said and done, the Latino community did come out to vote, and completely surprised us,” Murillo said. “We never anticipated that 29% of Latinos would vote for Trump.”
Murillo apparently had seen a headline claiming that the early Latino vote meant that “Trump is dead” in the election. She wrote:
“On a personal note, we really thought we had shown up to demonstrate our political power against a candidate who had vehemently offended our community by calling us rapists and drug dealers. We read the headline and thought WOW, we did it!”
She continued, “But then reality set in. Only 71% of Latinos voted for Hillary, and that wasn’t enough.” Murillo then admitted that she was not objective in trying to get the Latino vote, saying that the 2016 results were “devastating for our Democratic Latino community.”
HOLA, the project created by Google and its partners for the Latino vote, had a thread where people were “sharing how much they hurt” after the Trump election. Murillo was worried about contacting her partners over there because “some may actually be Trump supporters.”
She ended the email with this note, “I’m in shock and it hurts more than I could have ever imagined, but trying to stay optimistic and keep my head high. Loss is a part of life, and I do think frustrations challenge us to work smarter and get creative. My partners have sent notes and are saying the same thing -- time to keep working harder.” In another company email, Google Search Product Marketing official Mackenzie Thomas called Murillo’s work “100% partisan.”
On his show, Carlson said, “This wasn’t a get-out-the-vote effort or whatever they say...It was aimed only at one group, a group that Google cynically assumed would vote exclusively for the Democratic party.”
Democrats in office have referred to conservatives’ fear of bias in Google as a “conspiracy theory.” Last week, when the House convened a hearing of Twitter, the majority of Democrat representatives claimed that the reason for the hearing — conservative censorship —-- was bogus and “a load of crap.” Recently, Google has come under fire for its bias in search results: promoting negative news about President Trump.
Google, of course, denies the nature of the claim. A spokesperson to Breitbart said, “The views expressed in this email are the employee’s personal political views and are not representative of any official stance from the company. Google’s elections efforts -- both in 2016 and leading up to this year’s midterms -- have been entirely nonpartisan.”
